Damian Conway is giving a tutorial on Best Practices in Object Oriented Perl based on his new book: Perl Best Practices. What is a "best practice?"

• Same as the rest of Perl
• Seek code that
  • minimizes chances of "enbugging"
  • makes it easy to detect failed edge cases
  • scales to larger datasets
• Robust (create techniques that extend and incorporates new functionality)
• Efficient (play to Perl's strengths and avoids its weakness while minimizing resource usage)
• Maintainable (optimize for comprehension)

Make OO a choice, not a default - Choose OO when

• When the system to be built will be large
• Data can be aggregated into obvious structures and there's lots of data in each aggregate
• The various types of data form a natural hierarchy that facilitates inheritance and polymorphism
• The implementation of high-level operations on data varies according to data type (polymorphism is a big benefit here)
• Its likely you'll have to add new data types later
• Interaction between data are best represented by operators
• You have a piece of data on which many different operations are applied
• And, those operations have standard names, regardless of the type of data they're applied to
• Implementation of individual components is likely to change, especially in the same program
• The system design is already object-oriented
• Large numbers of clients will use your code